The present invention generally relates to a communication device, and, more particularly, to a portable phone.
A communication device is often used in a network having a plurality of nodes. When a user wants to establish a communication between the device and a node, then the user usually manually inputs a node identifier through a keyboard of the device.
For example, the device is a portable phone operating in a public or private telephone network where the nodes are further phones (e.g., cellular phones or fixed network phones). The user establishes a communication by dialing a phone number.
However, typing a number into a keyboard by a human might cause misled phone calls. A physically challenged person might not be able to use the keyboard.
Phones having a dial function that is supported by voice recognition became recently available on the market. Apart from technical problems occurring in a noisy environment, some users hesitate from speaking a phone number into the phone, for example, because they fear to disclose the number in public.
JP 9307617 teaches a portable phone where the number is dialed by a bar-code scanner; requiring that numbers have to be available in a bar-code format. U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,669 teaches a portable phone that can be connected to an external bar-code/OCR reader. Further references for OCR readers are U.S. Pat. No. 4,408,344, U.S. Pat. No. 4,075,605, U.S. Pat. No. 5,574,804, European Patent Specification EP 0063243B1, and European Patent Application EP 0062777A2.
The present invention seeks to provide a communication device which mitigate or avoid these and other disadvantages and limitations of the prior art.